Silly Novels and Lady Novelists: Inside the Literary Marketplace

Abstract

The mid-Victorian literary marketplace was a crucial site for debates over the role and status of the author.1 In the post-1840 period, many of the factors often seen to facilitate increasing male domination of a seemingly feminised literary marketplace also operated to the benefit of upper-class women writers. This advantage over their middle-class contemporaries was, however, a short-term one only. Several critics have traced an inverse relationship between the rising status of authorship as a profession and the cultural valuation of women writers and women’s writing, particularly after 1860.2 Aristocratic women writers had the challenges of entering into the literary marketplace in the first place, producing commercially appealing products within it, and achieving literary and intellectual credibility for their work. Not all these aims were compatible. My examination of the fashionable annuals of the early Victorian period, followed by a consideration of George Eliot’s mid-century attack on ‘silly novels’, demonstrates that the cultural criteria through which intellectual arbitrators delineated high art could be particularly disadvantageous to women of elevated social standing. The high-ranking woman writer risked serving as a bogey(wo)man in opposition to whom middle-class men and women authors could construct masculine intellectual canons. Aristocratic women could thus be twice-damned and twice-excluded from the echelons of canonical literature.